“Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot masturbate” – Dave Barry
I spend a significant portion of my day in meetings and often come out wondering what was accomplished.
I consistently see the following problems with meetings at work:
- No agenda, or even worse a vague agenda with little direction
- Someone in the room will have nothing of value to add and insist on adding it
- The full scheduled time will be used
- They breed; one meeting usually leads to another
- Typically about an abstract concept, not a concrete product or decisison
- They take preparation time
- End up totally off course
- The information transfer is typically minimal
Today I spent two hours in a room with 9 other people preparing a presentation. That’s not a two-hour meeting, it’s 20 hours of time. I work for a company that does internal quotes and business plans in hours. This meeting was a considerable expense.
A considerable amount of the time was caught up in arguing the nuances of language and listening to people who had nothing to contribute, but an existence to maintain. As with all big companies there are people who justify by filling up their calendar and adding nothing of value.
A meeting is not the place to create a pitch, it’s a place to get the team together to approve the changes they’ve previously submitted are correctly incorporated by the content owner. This was a couple of hours of my time and 20 hours of the companies time wasted.
A previous employer used to have gathering areas on the production floor, no meeting rooms. The philosophy was we were coming together to share the resolution, not rehash the problem. These meetings rarely lasted more than a few minutes and were as effective as 10 people sitting around a conference table hashing out a pitch.
There are some great tools, email, sharepoint and other online communication or colaberation tools, this allows me to manage my own time. When we meeting face to face at work the group seems to automatically assume they have an hour of my time, which seems to be the standard meeting length, and will take all of that time.
In an email I might grasp their concept within 2 minutes and be ready with a reply. Other times I need to think about their message overnight. All of this is impossible in face to face meetings where an immediate reaction and 100% dedication is demanded of the participants.
If you can’t avoid it and actually have to call a meeting: First is that it takes a leader to keep the group focused, and know that just because Outlook can’t easily handle bookings of less than 30 minutes, you don’t have to use every second. Make a very clear agenda and let people know what they need to come with. The meeting is a place to make decisions, not inform and create content.
Keep the numbers down and make the meeting for those that really need to be involved, the oxygen wasters who need meetings to validate their existence really don’t need to be there
The final, and to my mind the most important part of a meeting is when everyone walks away and the decision that’s made. Know who is responsible for recording, sharing and finally implementing the results.
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